Hey Cardanians! Welcome aboard the Weekly Cardano Digest #130!

We've filtered through all the noise to distill crucial updates into a breezy, 5-minute read. No need for you to sift through endless info — we've got you covered. Ready to delve into this week's top Cardano news? Let’s dive in.

Here are the topics of the week:

• 🛰️ SpaceX Is Now Tradable on Cardano via Strike Finance

• 🚀 Cardano Accelerator Demo Day: Five DeFi & Real-World-Asset Ventures Present

• ⚡Five DeFi & Real-World-Asset Ventures Present

• Weekly Development Report

• & More!

🛠️ Tx3 Is in Production: Cardano Protocols Can Now Be Called Like Typed APIs

SpaceX is now tradable on #Cardano. Strike Finance has launched 5x leverage on the stock, extending its perpetuals lineup beyond crypto and into real-world equity exposure on $ADA.

The listing adds one of the most coveted private companies in the world to Strike's on-chain markets, exposure that is typically locked behind private placements and accredited-investor gates, now reachable from a self-custodial Cardano account, with no broker and no centralized intermediary.

Strike has consistently been one of the most profitable dApps on Cardano, shipping new features at a steady pace. Bringing real-world equities on-chain positions #Cardano as one of the first ecosystems where users can trade crypto and traditional markets side by side, exactly the kind of real-world utility that compounds regardless of the price cycle.

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🚀 Cardano Accelerator Demo Day: Five DeFi & Real-World-Asset Ventures Present

Cardano Foundation's Venture Hub held Demo Day for the Spring 2026 cohort of the Cardano Accelerator Program, with five early-stage DeFi and real-world-asset ventures presenting to investors.

The cohort: Toto Finance (institutional infrastructure for tokenized commodities), Libertum (compliant RWA issuance and liquidity), NOBON (digital infrastructure for climate finance), Colossus Digital (staking and governance across 20+ chains), and The Mint (regulated tokens backed 1:1 by verified physical gemstones, MiCA-aligned).

The cohort's heavy RWA and compliance focus shows where Cardano's builder pipeline is heading, toward regulated, institution-facing products rather than purely speculative DeFi. The program continues to channel new builders toward DeFi and tokenized real-world assets on #Cardano.

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⚡ Van Rossem Hard Fork Reaches PreProd

Cardano's PreProd testnet enacted the Van Rossem hard fork at 00:00 UTC and is now running Protocol Version 11. Van Rossem is an intra-era upgrade, the network stays in the Conway era, so transaction formats are unchanged for wallets, dApps, and exchanges.

It introduces new Plutus built-ins, BLS12-381 multi-scalar multiplication for cryptographic operations, and VRF key-uniqueness improvements for stake-pool security, with Plutus/UPLC optimizations expected to cut script execution costs by more than 10%. PreProd is the final checkpoint before mainnet: SPOs, developers, dApps, and exchanges are now testing and feeding back to inform the mainnet submission timeline.

With Leios advancing in parallel, the second half of 2026 is shaping up as one of the most consequential execution windows for #Cardano's protocol layer since the Chang hard fork, a quiet but major upgrade to what builders can ship on $ADA.

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Essential Cardano’s weekly development report